The Pleasures of Metamorphosis

Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of "The Little Mermaid"

Lucy Fraser

Publication Year: 2017

Lucy Fraser's The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy-Tale Transformations of "The Little Mermaid" explores Japanese and English transformations of Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 Danish fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" by focusing on pleasure as a means to analyze the huge variety of texts that transform a canonical fairy tale such as Andersen's. Fraser examines over twenty Japanese and English transformations, including literary texts, illustrated books, films, and television series. This monograph also draws upon criticism in both Japanese and English, meeting a need in Western fairy-tale studies for more culturally diverse perspectives. Fraser provides a model for critical cross-cultural fairy tale analysis in her examination of the journey of a single fairy tale across two languages. The book begins with the various approaches to reading and writing fairy tales, with a history of "The Little Mermaid" in Japanese and English culture. Disney's The Little Mermaid and Studio Ghibli's Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea are discussed as examples that simulate pleasurable physical experiences through animation's tools of music and voice, and visual effects of movement and metamorphosis. Fraser then explores the literary effects of the fairy tale by male authors, such as Oscar Wilde, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, and Abe Kobo, who invoke familiar fairy-tale conventions and delineate some of the pleasures of what can be painful enchantment with a mermaid or with the fairy tale itself. The author examines the portrayals of the mermaid in three short stories by Matsumoto Yuko, Kurahashi Yumiko, and Ogawa Yoko, engaging with familiar fairy tales, reference to fairy-tale research, and reflections on the immersive experience of reading. Women characters and authors are also hyperaware of the possible meanings of Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" and of the fairy tale itself, furthering the discussion with Nonaka Hiiragi's novel Ningyo-hime no kutsu, and D[di?]'s novel Sento no ningyo-hime to majo no mori, as well as an episode of the science fiction television series Dark Angel. Fraser concludes that the "pleasure" framework is useful for a cross-cultural study of creative engagements with and transformations of a particular fairy tale. Few studies have examined Japanese fairy-tale transformations to the extent that Fraser has, presenting fascinating information that will intrigue fairy-tale scholars and those wanting to learn more about the representation of pleasure behind the imaginative and fantastical.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Introduction

Since the publication of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little
Mermaid” in 1837, it has traveled across countries and languages, transforming
into an astounding variety of forms. The human-fish hybrid body
of Andersen’s mermaid and the troubled relationship the story poses between
this body and the mermaid’s romantic and spiritual desires have inspired
critical and creative musings on gender and its intersections with
body, sexuality, and social roles. Moreover, the plot of “The Little Mermaid”
seems to anticipate the tale’s transcultural, translinguistic movement: a...

1. Fairy Tale Transformations in Japanese and English

The heroine of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 Danish fairy tale “The Little
Mermaid” becomes, at the end of the tale, a “daughter of the air.” Yet even
before she is able to fly, she slips across borders: her half-fish form in itself
rejects the boundaries of the human body; she changes from mermaid to
human and then becomes sea foam so that the border between her body
and the sea is removed. Finally she is re-formed as an ethereal air sprite.
The mermaid also moves between locations, journeying from the ocean to
the land before reaching the sky. Andersen’s popular tale itself has shifted...

2. Children’s Pleasures in Animated Film Adaptations

Animated adaptations of “The Little Mermaid” often express desire and
pleasure through motion. In the famous Disney adaptation of Andersen’s
fairy tale, The Little Mermaid (dir. Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989),
the mermaid heroine Ariel sings of her desire to walk and run on land, spiralling
upward through the ocean water toward the sun. A few decades later,
in Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, dir. Miyazaki Hayao,
2008), Studio Ghibli launched its fish-girl Ponyo into an uninhibited dash
over the waves to her prince. These scenes capture some of the possibilities...

3. Fairy Tale Architextuality and the Prince’s Pleasures

Animated adaptations of “The Little Mermaid” bring the fairy tale to life
in brilliant color, sound, and movement, but of course, literary texts had
endeavored to capture the striking aesthetic impact of the mermaid in the
centuries before these films. In doing so, the transformations I take up
here evince a particularly suggestive fondness for gold and silver and other
precious objects, as Lüthi describes in the epigraph. Their dialogues with
Andersen’s story engage the “clarity” of the fairy tale form to their own stylized,
art-obsessed ends, delving into the pleasures of a deep knowledge of...

The appeal of the fairy tale, it seems, cannot be easily captured. From the
quite divergent explanations in the epigraphs, we can only surmise that the
fairy tale brings pleasure because it is something with a sharp edge, something
with power. For Kurahashi, fairy tales offer the intellectual pleasure
of close familiarity with the genre and with the satisfying forces that rule its
narratives. For Matsumoto, an academic discovery of deeper “truth” drives
our interest in a particular tale. And for Higami, fairy tales are appetizing,
mysterious objects with the ability to affect their...

5. Girls Reading and Retelling “The Little Mermaid”

Though the mermaid might appear to be nothing more than a lonely sailor’s
sex dream, she has in fact become a popular figure in children’s stories, a
free and magical creature who fascinates young girls in particular. Andersen’s
“The Little Mermaid,” which hinges on birthdays and painful physical
changes, cemented the tale as one of coming of age, and we have seen in chapter
2 how this tradition continues in recent analogues such the Disney film
adaptation. In fact, growing-up plots feature in many more mermaid stories
for preadolescent and teenage girls. As revisions such as Matsumoto’s show...

A recent collection of short manga episodes by the contemporary woman
artist Watanabe Peco, titled Henshin monogatari (Tales of metamorphosis,
2008), opens and closes with a two-part story that transforms “The Little
Mermaid.” In Watanabe’s opening episode, titled “A Mermaid of Today”
(“Heisei ningyo”; lit. Heisei-period mermaid), a girl mermaid named Rin acts
on her desire for her prince. Rin has just left shōjo-hood and come of age.
She explains that her ancestor was the model for Andersen’s mermaid but
that Rin’s own metamorphosis to human was not equally painful...

Conclusion

Hans Christian Andersen’s touching, imaginative story “The Little Mermaid”
has inspired endless transformations. The fairy tale conveys a deep, dramatic
sense of yearning and emotional suffering imagined through descriptions
of muteness and terrible pain. It evokes experiences of girlhood and growing
up through imagery of physical metamorphosis and upward movement
through different environments. The mermaid’s movement across different
realms and her experience as an outsider on land is echoed in the journeys
that the tale itself has made across cultures and into different shapes. The...

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